shredded handwriting

For a couple of years now, since April 2015, I’ve been shredding my personal handwriting and creating various events and artefacts with it for my creative PhD research. More recently I considered weaving not just text-weaves with my strips but a tuigen (a cloak once worn by the fili). Being of Irish decent, and a poet, such a concept was a natural progression of my work.

During this process much happened, including a tui flying into a window, its subsequent death, and burial (done in accordance with tangata whenua). Here is a picture of the box I commissioned artist, John Radford, to make for the tui which carried it until its burial (I deliberately took no photos of the tui in death, or of its burial).

The tui was wrapped in text from a female rabbi and one of my own iou poems, written by a bamboo etched pen, along with a handkerchief that was of significance. The tui was buried close to where it died. Curiously, there was a feather where we buried the tui and later, when its green sheen showed held up to the light, thought it to be a tui feather. Until recently, the cloak I have woven travelled in the box that held the tui, along with the found feather (the cape is presently in transit in Venice, thus travelling without the tui feathers too).

The most recent shredding I’ve done is from my personal writing on A1 sheets of architecture tracing paper (what I used in the tuigen / cape). I use the tracing paper as a direct reference to Derrida’s ‘trace’. Of course there is a long thesis I am writing on the matter…and much more weaving to be done.